I played in my very first cash Omaha tourney today, and a little apprehensive going into it; I’ve played maybe a handful of Omaha games during my short poker career. Omaha is similar to Texas Hold ‘Em, and yet there are dramatic differences. Hold ‘Em has more variance and more risk taking – a good player exploits the edges by turning a 55/45 advantage into a 60/40 advantage. You steal as many nickels and dimes as possible to cover your blinds and occasionally take down that big pot.

Omaha edges are enormous, but the pace is glacial compared to Hold ‘Em. If Texas Hold ‘Em is a sprint, then Omaha is a marathon. Since I’m ADHD, impulsive and mercurial, Hold ‘Em fits my personality perfectly. Omaha, on the other hand, is intellectual suicide. I wasn’t going to bother calculating my odds and outs and simply play from my gut. (more…)

In a recent interview with a writers magazine, I wrapped up my thougths with this:

We can’t become self-hypnotized by the notion of assuming the role of the “suffering artist” as the only means of reaching our creative peak – I don’t want to be a Van Gogh slicing my ear off, or a Hemingway with a shotgun pressed to my lips. There is joy in the world; we have a full spectrum of emotions to explore.

This was redacted from the final transcript that I received. I guess being happy isn’t hip enough.

I’ve discovered one upside from the sting of a breakup – productivity. Since Friday, I’ve banged out 15,000 words a day and finished my first novel, Slings and Arrows (well, technically it’s my second, the first just an embarrassing mess that’s mothballed on a dead hard drive). I’ll spend next week on edits and revisions and then need to start shopping it to agents.

The Shakespeare reference is a bit cheeky, but it helped carry me through to the end.

You’d think that after breaking up with the girl that I knew was “the one", my first instinct would be to blog about the heartache. You know, the typical stuff… how she slips into my dreams and whispers sweet things and then the alarm rudely interrupts the reverie. I lie there awake and her image still floats in my mind’s eye like a half-lit ephemera. And then reality wipes the sleep from your eyes and you feel that coiling in your stomach like a pit of snakes – you’re never gonna see her again, dude (I call myself dude when I talk to myself; at least I’m not referring to myself in the 3rd person like Bob Dole).

But no! This post is actually about genetic determinism. Momma always said that a good book on genetic determinism could nurse a broken heart, so I re-read Stephen Jay Gould’s interesting but ultimately flawed The Mismeasure of Man.

Gould gets things right for all the wrong reasons, and when he gets them wrong he employs the most exasperatingly biased logic. The main thrust of the book is that IQ is bunk, intelligence can’t be measured, and that intelligence is not inherited.

His primary argument is that the forefathers of genetic studies were blatant racists – and he’s right. Gould gives numerous examples, two that are so appalling they’re borderline comical. One scientist recommended that the government pay every Irishman to murder every nigger, and then hang the Irishmen for their crime. Another scientist gave lectures on – get this – Niggerology. These racist researchers fudged the numbers on so many brain case studies between the various races, so how could they possibly be right?

But then Gould descends into twisting Alfred Binet’s own words on intelligence testing (Binet was the creator of the IQ test) to fit his own political agenda. Gould was a self-described Marxist, and his left-leaning arguments against the genetic/hereditary impact on intelligence were as subtle as a sledgehammer to the skull. Gould worships Darwin throughout the book – you would swear he was wearing a “I Heart Chuck” shirt while writing the initial draft. And yet Darwin’s theory directly impacted everything we know today about genetics and how it correlates with intelligence. Gould’s political bias taints his work just as much as those he railed against. If Gould’s theory on hereditary intelligence was correct, then every chimpanzee has the potential to be a rocket scientist.

I closed the book and immediately had the memory of a smell – her hair. Her hair had the fresh, clean smell of the top of a newborn baby’s head. It lingered like a song that you can’t shake from your head.

Looks like I’ve gotta order another Stephen Jay Gould book.

Sunday night is a weekly reminder of my innate, intractable stupidity. Trash and refuse overflows from my main garbage can – it’s now week three that I’ve forgotten to put the trash bin on the metaphorical curb for its weekly collection. Realizing I have a ticking timebomb on the side of my house, I finally drag the bin to the side of the road.

This stupidity, which many times masquerades as recalcitrance, has frustrated a wife and three girlfriends in the past. As a kid, I memorized Pi to 100 digits (for fun!) and could solve a Rubik’s cube in 33 seconds. Yet these so-called ’smarts’ rarely translated into real-world practicality. The wife would want to throttle me because every Monday morning would pass with the trash can loitering on the side of the house. Girlfriends throw their collective hands in the air because they need to repeat their travel itinerary a dozen times and remind me their flight leaves at 10 p.m. to arrive at the airport on time.

The weekly appointment with the garbage man was a humble reminder of the different types of intelligence we employ. I’ve never been interested whatsoever in data for data’s sake; give me a pattern or sequence and I can be occupied for hours on end. As a kid, my dad gave me a book on the Fibonacci sequence; the decomposition of these numbers into discrete forumulae (more…)

I had a recent run-in with a grammar nazi while playing Texas Hold ‘Em at Ft. McDowell casino. The linguistic miscreant and I evntually played a hand heads up and beat him pretty badly, taking more than half his stack. Miscreant didn’t take his beating too well and started jawing, questioning my IQ (I just took half your money and you’re calling me dumb?)

I made a comment to him and he fires back “you obviously have a low IQ because you just ended a sentence with a preposition.”

Poker is as much a psychological game as it is mathematical. After a casual check of my hole cards, I reply “Latin needs every preposition to immediately precede its object noun. English has no case endings on nouns that are objects of prepositions. English is a Germanic language, not Latin.” I smile.

A paper I wrote some years back, Leveling by Morphological Analogy, touches upon that and other misplaced Latin analogies, (more…)

You miss your girlfriend. She’s 836 miles and 12 hours away across the state line. Bored, frustrated… it’s as though your soul has been dipped in a strange mix of ennui and mania. Despite all common sense and protests from the left brain, you top off the gas tank, grab two large coffees and hit the road.

I-17 unfurls from straight slabs of highway into ribbons of serpentine mountain roads that climb to 3000 feet. A fingernail moon paints the saguaro desert in silver light. The towering cacti thin as you climb in elevation and eventually disappear like ghosts. You hit 4000 feet and the Colorado Plateau greets you with an ocean of arid scrub.

Deadman Gulch… Horsethief Basin… Bloody Basin Road… desert arteries bleed by as you cruise past the thinning Phoenix traffic and hit a steadily increasing speed of 110 and beyond.

Without warning, a straight stretch of road presents itself before you like an immaculate sacrifice. That desert road stabs at a black horizon spackled with stars, beckons you like irresistible virgin-white thighs waiting to be parted. No one is here. You can’t say no. No one will know. You punch the turbo and revel in its high-pitched hiss as the car rockets to 140 mph and your head slams the back of the seat.

For that fleeting moment of pure bliss, that metaphorical gun shot of speed ripping through the freezing desert air, you simply wallow in the sensation of movement as your body melts into the car. Once you adjust to the speed, the brain almost enters a meditative theta wave state.

Which, of course, is shattered by the slashing blue and red highway patrol lights blinking pathetically in your rear view mirror. (more…)

Terminally bored on a night when most are getting plowed as they ring in the New Year, I pull the plug on the boob tube and approach my book shelf. Eyes closed, my fingertips blindly trace along the spines until I stop at a random book – Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Conrad isn’t the cheeriest author to read when you’re celebrating a looming new year’s tabula rasa. But damn it if I don’t fall for his dark, lush prose every time. Then this gem, halfway through the novella:

We live as we dream – alone

A chuckle at Conrad’s pathological pessimism triggers one of my favorite quotes of all-time from a fellow Pittsburgher, Dennis Miller:

“I’m one of the more pessimistic cats on the planet. I make Van Gogh look like a rodeo clown.”

At least I have two dachshunds keeping me company (read: snoring away) when the ball drops. Which reminds me, I have exactly 28 minutes to squeeze in one last dose of nicotine before 2007’s resolution kicks in.

Headed back to Pittsburgh to spend time with the family for the holidays, brand spankin’ new 17″ MacBook Pro in tow. The rationale was not only could I dump holiday photos from my Nikon D80 into the laptop, but also keep pace with my 2,000-3,000 words per day on my new work in progress.

So what have I done for the last 3 hours? Play with the web cam built into the LCD bezel (webcam pics posted here and here).

Somehow, I get the feeling Faulkner wasn’t fucking with a webcam while writing As I Lay Dying.

Had you told me a year ago that by the end of 2006 I would be divorced from my wife of 15 years, had forsaken alcohol, and become a published writer to boot… well, I would’ve pointed to your picture in the DSM-IV. But here I am – single, sober, and published.

2006 quickly spiraled down into that much loathed annus horribilis that seems to blindside all of us a few times in our lives. Despite having my metaphorical nuts in a vice for the last 9 months or so, I’ve emerged mostly unscathed. And still the belching, farting miscreant that I’ve always been. Plus ça change, indeed.

Here’s to 2007!

Sometimes, one’s ego can get stroked in the wrong way.

We writers are a strange bunch – our over-inflated egos are only matched by our pathological inability to handle criticism. We gather in writers’ groups that amount to nothing more than mutual admiration clubs; as soon as someone has the stones to tell us our writing sucks, we run off screeching to the hills.

So when I recently received my first official contract for fiction publication, I became despondent. The anthology editor selected the first short story I’d ever written, a predictable and (more…)

The wife and I recently attended Bubbonicon 37 in Albuquerque, NM, to see my favorite author – Stephen R. Donaldson – give his guest of honor speech. Since we were in the neighborhood, we decided to take a day trip to Santa Fe and Taos.

Besides beautiful art galleries and killer New Mexican cuisine (with hatch chiles, of course), Santa Fe and Taos crawled with socialist agitprop and the nearly-ubiquitous ‘Bush=Chimp’ meme t-shirts. In Eske’s Brewpub, I swear I saw Che Guevara in the kitchen and Noam Chomsky serving pints.

Still, it was comforting to know even blue staters can appreciate Eske’s awesome Seco Stout (a hearty foreign extra stout, 7% abv). We’re not so different, after all…

When faced with two weeks of vacation, most normal folks plan normal activities. A trip to Disneyland, chores around the house, hopping on a plane to visit relatives.

I plan to spend my 14 days of respite with a stack of French decadent/surrealist literature.

Yeah, yeah, I know… conservatives are supposed to hate all things French. Those cheese eating surrender monkeys spit in the face of everything we American conservatives hold dear to our hearts. But it’s that French recalcitrance, arrogance, cynicism and nostalgie pour la boue that sings to that black, misanthropic corner of my heart.

It all started last year after reading Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers. Genet’s work is repulsive, utterly contemptuous… and yet his his gangrenous prose gnawed through my brain, revealing dark secrets impossible to ignore. To read Genet’s writing is to witness a spiritual train wreck, simultaneously eliciting horror and morbid fascination (more…)

I’ve emerged mostly unscathed from the first two days of NaNoWriMo. And unlike John Kerry, despite having terrible productivity, I’m unwilling to concede. November 1 was a solid production day, writing just under 800 words for the opening of the novel. Yesterday was virtually a no-show, managing only 150 words while getting caught up in the fiasco known as exit polls, the Democrat’s myth of provisional ballots in Ohio and a rather convincing 3.5 million vote surplus for the incumbent.

To hit the 50,000 word goal, the daily NaNo quota has to be around 1600 words— I’m already 2,000+ words in the hole. Still, it’s nice feeling productive once again, which is what NaNo is all about.

Driving north on Scottsdale road today, I was continually stuck behind a women in Black Mercedes. It was your garden-variety Scottsdale femme— Nordic, chiseled features, replete with obscenely expensive exercise/active wear topped off with one of those oh-so-cute little bitchy baseball caps. From my limited vantage, I could not visually confirm her tits were augmented with the ridiculous dual-viking-helmets-stuffed-under-my-shirt look.

So there she was, holding up every green light for 10+ seconds, reaching into back seat, fidgeting into an unseen purse, etc. I finally spy a cel phone wedged between her shoulder and left ear. And then I spot her steering with the base of her right elbow— she’s grasping an object–or objects–with her right hand. Chopsticks.

Fucking chopsticks.

At every green light, she’s blathering into her phone, reaching into back seat while simultaneously trying to stuff her goddamn maw with chinese food by way of chopsticks. All of this on a road with a posted 50mph (where traffic typically runs from 60-75mph).

Are we that pathetic that we must talk and eat in our car while a cavalcade of SUVs blare past us at 60+mph? What was so bloody important that she HAD TO reach into her back seat while chatting on the phone– was she an obsterician (with a penchant for sweet-n-sour pork) delivering a baby in the back seat?

Are we so distracted/detached that we can no longer communicate to each other unless it’s while we’re on a busy freeway (God forbid if we were forced to sit down and personally handwrite a letter to a friend)? Are we only able to consume meals now in our luxury sedans and not in the presence of family and friends?

Somedays I pray for that impending asteroid hit. Out of the remaining few thousand survivors, another 90% would die off from not having a single clue as to how sustain life by their own hand. The older I get, the more I think technology has had a crippling effect on our collective psyche. Jesus, what a cranky old luddite I’ve become…

A blood moon rises above the Four Peaks. It is a glabrous disk, gravid with a crimson light that guides its soaring orbit high above the desert hardpan. We’re moving into our new home; an eclipse gobbles the last few morsels of the moon until only a silver and scarlet fingernail remains. As we move the last few boxes into our garage, the moon is utterly obscured, devoured by umbra and clouds drifting like ghost ships in the night.

We have no TV service, so I have no way to hear the last few outs of the game. I quickly unpack a radio and extend the antenna. Through the AM crackle and noise, the announcer declares the Boston Red Sox as World Champions.

I go to sleep in my new house, knowing that everything is alright in the world— even if just for one night.

My wife had major surgery this past June—a hysterectomy. Despite the initial shock of having to deal with an invasive procedure – and one with the ruthless finality of a door slamming shut – we quickly came to peace with the fact that the surgery was necessary. We had no children. And now, we never will. The only external testaments to our love are the simplest of gestures that most couples take for granted.

This has led to some extraordinarily painful yet hilarious conversations with other couples. Because of our relatively young age (both 35), other couples will ask us when we plan to have kids (with the undercurrent of you’ve been married for 12 years now, what’s the hold up? shadowing the discussion).

We then have to break the bad news that no, we won’t be having kids—and this is where the true fun begins. Some people quickly excuse themselves with convenient bathroom emergencies; others contort their faces into grimaces of pain and loss, unable to grasp the suffering we surely must be going through. Many try to comfort us with the reminder that adoption is still an option (thanks, we had never thought of that).

I need a funny comeback/double entendre for these uncomfortable situations—telling other people that my ostensibly healthy and fecund wife has undergone a de-feminizing hysterectomy is like an instant recipe for a funeral—people want to either console us or run as far, far away from our “loss” as possible.

So here’s what I’m thinking—tell people that my wife’s uterus has been surgically replaced with a Kenner Easy-Bake Oven™. Or that I’m a hermaphrodite and reproduction was moot anyway. Or something equally silly that will help people laugh instead of freaking out because my genes won’t be passed on to another generation.

Any thoughts?

With the Yankees getting spanked by a score of 8-1 in game 7 of the ALCS, New York fans began chanting who’s your daddy? as Pedro Martinez took the mound in the bottom of the 7th.

New York fans have to be the most annoying in baseball, just behind Atlanta and their droning tomahawk chop. It’s 9-3 Red Sox, bottom of the 8th, 1out, and time to shut the Yankees up once and for all.

update (bottom of the 9th):

With sincere apologies to ol’ Blue Eyes… start spreading the news…

The Sox are going to the World Series!

I promised myself not to blog at all about the debates. Too much political fatigue, and despite being a rational guy I’m clearly a partisan. But I’ve got to make one comment…

Why the hell are Kerry and the democrats so enthralled with Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter?

My meds must need checked. Or maybe I’m just a late-blooming masochist.

I just signed up for NaNoWriMo.

NaNoWriM0 (National Novel Writing Month) is a self-imposed literary Bataan Death March, demanding that the writer take part in a fictional marathon of sorts for the entire month of November. The goal is deceptively simple: complete a 50,000 word novel – from scratch – during the month of November.

It doesn’t sound like a herculean effort until you do the math – 50,000 words divided by 30 days averages to about 1600 words a day. That didn’t (more…)

It’s so rare these days to find stories like those that inspired me to become a writer. Short story markets in particular are shriveling up as magazine racks become even more competitive. Publishers seem to only push novels the girth of a brick (ironic when you consider our decreasing attention span and increasing demand for instant gratification).

The occasional gem still presents itself, reminding me why I love to read and inspiring me to become a better writer. Check out Matthew Claxton’s The Anatomist’s Apprentice – it’s an oddly beautiful short story. (UPDATE – at 12,000 words, it’s technically a novellette [albeit a short novellette], but who’s counting?)

The Religion of Peace™ has beheaded two more Americans, Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley. While I don’t frequent places like ogrish.com and rotten.com, I’m not particularly phased by graphic depictions of death and dismemberment. Macabre fare really doesn’t interest me, so I’m still wondering what prompted me to download and watch the video of Armstrong’s beheading.

I avoided the previous videos (Paul Johnson, Nick Berg, et al.) because I thought them to be a sort of on-demand Grand Guignol for the internet, an ultimate form of Reality TV for those no longer grossed out by NBC’s Fear Factor.

This is no Grand Guignol. The blood is real, as are the screams – all played out on a world stage.

It’s tempting to declare the act portrayed in the video as unspeakable; the writer in me can’t scramble fast enough to find the precise string of adjectives to describe a human being butchered as the cameras rolled.

The video opens with a black screen and the voice-over of a man singing in Arabic. It sounds like an Islamic hymn, a haunting canticle to serve as a prelude of the blood that would soon be spilled. I can’t help but think of Klansmen singing Amazing Grace before hoisting a Negro to a tree. The hairs on my arm rise.

Armstrong is bound and blindfolded. He kneels in front of his captors, facing (more…)

It’s now Football Season in the US, which means we’re subjected to the usual battery of braindead beer commercials every Sunday. I usually ignore the sophomoric marketing efforts from the big 3 breweries, but the latest push from Coors is so patently false it’s pissing me off.

Over the past few years, macro-breweries are marketing the notion that colder beer is better beer. It’s ubiquitous in the ads – there’s frost on the mugs with chunks of ice sloughing down the sides of the glass. Even more reputable brewers fall prey to this marketing babble by dumbing down their labeling (I recently spotted a ’serve ice cold’ notice on a bottle of Guinness Draught).

This is absurd, of course, because cold kills the flavor of (more…)

… I’m getting the site cleaned up. The navigation menu is still largely non-functional, but I managed to get the hagiography link fixed.

I’m also slowly posting my fiction excerpts back to the site – the opening of The Ballad of El Corrupto is now available.

I’m writing my very first log entry from the new home. We’re still 4 weeks out from moving in; I’m sitting on a slate floor that still needs grout, and there are random piles of woodchips, bird shit and drywall dust that need swept. Still, despite her chaotic appearance, the house is ours – the wooden beams and logs and timbers have already planted deep roots into our soul. This is our home.

Outside the massive picture window, the Four Peaks are bathed in a purplish-red glow, almost as if the sun had drenched the mountains in a light red wine. Stretching before the mountain range is a vast stretch of sonoran desert, punctuated by clumps of mesquite and lone spires of majestic saguaros. Every acre of sand surrounding us is etched with dry washes and old trails that barely echo the Indians uprooted to the reservations so long ago. A cool breeze caresses my back as the sun melts into shades of tangerine and plum along the darkening horizon.

After a six month blogging hiatus and nearly 4 straight weeks of no fiction, I can almost feel my muse yelling hum up, queenie! with a whip cracking at my heels.

2003 was an extraordinary year for my freshman stab at writing; for 2004, the sophomore slump is definitely in effect. Last year I averaged one complete short story per month. This year I’ve started maybe half-a-dozen stories but have completed none of them. Zip, zilch, nada.

In the silverlining department, I just received a rather positive rejection from Paradox Magazine for my story The Blessed Unfortunates. The editor said “your writing was strong, but the ending seemed a bit overly fortuitous in my opinion…” Which of course is spot on – Unfortunates is my second story ever written, and you can almost hear the ending being telegraphed halfway through the story. A predictable yarn, but the strong writing comment is encouraging. When I get around to it, I’ll throw the story up in my Omnibus section and put this story to rest for good.

Speaking of Omnibus, the site has been gutted (switched from .php to .asp) and redesigned (implemented CSS). As a Mac guy, nothing appeals to me more than getting apache server up and running in 5 minutes and throwing some quick and easy php stuff together, but my job is going in the opposite direction. We’re on the ASP.NET platform now, so I’m currently up to my ears in learning VBscript, C# and a bunch of other stuff a Mac guy shouldn’t have to learn.

Anyway, once the site is cleaned up, I should have all my old content back up, including the fiction excerpts. My next story to be finsihed is A Terrible Splendour.